Posted on July 31, 2012 in
Articles The Article: Two friends of the 1 percent in The Socialist Worker.
The Text: “MITT ROMNEY made over $100 million by shutting down our plant and devastated our lives.”
Those words, from a worker at a factory taken over and closed down by Romney’s private equity firm Bain Capital, captured the Republican presidential candidate perfectly–an out-of-touch Wall Street parasite who made a fortune in the corporate takeover business, who’s so filthy rich that he’s scared to release his tax returns, who attends $75,000-per-couple fundraising dinners at the home of billionaire union-hater David Koch.
It’s no surprise that the comment was featured in pro-Obama campaign ads which ran in swing states last week–and which portrayed the president, by contrast, as a determined fighter for ordinary Americans, intent on stopping tax breaks for the wealthy and protecting working-class jobs.
There’s no doubt that Romney is every bit the repulsive job-killer the ad portrays him to be. But Barack Obama isn’t a determined fighter for working-class people in the U.S.–and it’s important for everyone who cares about the struggle for the 99 percent to understand why.
Obama and the Democrats may be talking about how bad Romney is for workers right now, but the last four years have been the Democrats’ turn to cozy up to Corporate America and push through many of the same anti-worker policies that the Republicans support.
From failing to keep their promise to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the super-rich to spearheading an assault on public-sector unions, the Obama administration has dashed the expectations of millions who supported it in 2008–all in the service of the bankers and bosses of Corporate America.
So if the Obama campaign wants to draw attention to the war on workers in the U.S., it’s a good opportunity to talk about that war–and which side the Democrats are actually on.
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DEMOCRATS HAVE seized the opportunity to hammer away at Romney’s refusal to give up his tax information.
“My research suggests Mitt Romney is the first presidential candidate in American history with a Swiss bank account,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a rousing floor speech last week. “We shouldn’t have a political system where a candidate can claim to champion working people, while that same person is secretly betting against America through tax avoidance and tax haven abuse.”
Of course, tax avoidance is old hat to Romney, who founded Bain and remained its CEO, president, chairman of the board and only stockholder until 2002. Among other scams, Bain specialized in creating offshore sub-companies in the Cayman Islands to help foreign investors avoid paying taxes on investments in the U.S. Or as Romney described it to the National Review, “[O]ur business was able to invest in other people’s dreams, many of which were successful.”
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